Evaluate Lines of Ruby in Vim

2012.10.10

One of the joys of working with software is finding the right tools and customizing them for optimal use. In that sense, I've been tweaking Vim for use with Ruby. One feature in particular which I've wanted to include is the ability to evaluate a line of Ruby and print the result as an inline comment. For example, we start with:

"string".reverse

and then hit some key combination and get this:

"string".reverse# => "gnirts"

The feature comes built-in in TextMate, but requires additional set up to work in Vim.

After some quick research, I found an answer on StackOverflow. The necessary software in question is rcodetools which includes the command line program: xmpfilter.

Since rcodetools is a Ruby gem, installation is simply a matter of using gem to pull down the code:

gem install rcodetools

There is more to rcodetools than just xmpfilter. For those interested, rcodetools includes several README's explaining the installation process to get everything working with the editor of choice (e.g., Vim or emacs).

In my case, though, I was only interested in xmpfilter and so was happy to find vim-ruby-xmpfilter, a Vim plugin which consists of a basic wrapper function to invoke xmpfilter in Vim.

After installing the Vim plugin, the last step is assigning key-mappings in the .vimrc file. Suggested key-mappings are included as part of vim-ruby-xmpfilter and are as follows: